What a shitty year. Like everyone else, being locked inside 24/7 since March put me in a comfort food headspace. Despite the fact that I've got 30 new releases on this list, I spent most of my video game time plugging through the Mass Effect trilogy, Fallout: New Vegas, most of the Wolfenstein titles...all old favorites.
The new games that DID stick out to me this year were the ones that wrestled with the same problems we all are. Kentucky Route Zero, Wasteland 3, Umurangi Generation - even Watch Dogs: Legion and Cyberpunk 2077, spineless as they are comparative to those indie titles, *gestured* towards a late-stage capitalist crisis.
Note: there are a few itch.io/independently released titles on here that aren't in Giant Bomb's wiki, so I picked whatever I thought was their closest equivalent title and added them that way.
Still in progress, to be added later: Maid of Sker, Gears Tactics, Hades
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As someone who couldn't get more than an hour into Wasteland 2 without giving up on how CRPG of a CRPG it was, Wasteland 3 is my default choice for the most surprising game of the year: I fucking loved it. Like a lot of people, I'm pretty sick of apocalyptic fiction, but Wasteland 3 did a tremendous job at reminding me why the collapse of society is such a rich foundation for a roleplaying game. As much as we talk about the political or moral complexities to decision-making in RPGs like Mass Effect, Witcher or Fallout, they so rarely *actually* test your beliefs. More often than not, moral choices are built for fun or for narrative flavor. Even in Fallout: New Vegas and Outer Worlds, RPGs lauded for their storytelling prowess, the good and bad actors in any given situation are usually pretty clear. Outer Worlds in particular, the other post-Fallout Fallout title, goes as far as offering an objective best case scenario for its messiest moral and political dilemmas. What makes Wasteland 3 so interesting is that while, yes, there are some obvious moral and immoral figures, the most ethical and lasting outcome of your decisions is always in question. The biggest choices you get to make demand that you draw the line between yourself and people that you've come to like - sometimes irrevocably. Putting points into dialogue (here separated into Kiss Ass, Hard Ass and Barter) is no catchall towards victory as it is in other RPGs. The game goes as far as warning you via a loading screen tool tip that its dialogue skill checks might peacefully resolve a conflict without also leading to the best long term solution. You can't threaten a character into becoming an ally, for example, or sweet talk a violent gang into a life of lawful good. Wasteland 3's most difficult to resolve conflicts fulfill a promise so many RPGs make but so few follow through with. An example: in one early Mass Effect trailer, a steely-eyed Commander Shephard studies two distress calls, both from space-faring colonies in need of immediate rescue, and mutes one of them - he'd only have the time and resources to rescue one group, so the other would have to fail. But this scenario never occurs in the game. In reality, Mass Effect only demands the player make a 'it's him or me' decision once, and the context boils the decision down to what is essentially arbitrary player preference. In Wasteland 3, you're confronted with this exact dilemma almost immediately after traversing into the open world: an allied convoy carrying dangerous military gear has been ransacked by raiders, and the crew is awaiting execution. Meanwhile, a gang with a personal grudge against you, personally, has taken a family you've never met hostage to bait you into a rescue. The tactical decision is clear, but the most ethical decision is not. The consequences either way are long term and immediately legible. In gameplay terms, another element key to Wasteland 3's success is that it ditches point and click, turn-based mechanics and adds isometric 3rd person movement outside of combat and Xcom-style tactics in combat. I find that that tactile feel is necessary (at least for me!) to really get engaged with an RPG. The combat itself isn't the most wildly innovative tactical RPG combat out there, but it's sturdy and fun to engage with, particularly when the stakes are high. Wasteland 3 also pushes boundaries (and buttons) with its characters and story. My favorite opposing factions were a peaceful robotic commune and a cult named The Gippers, who follow the orders of Ronald Reagan's corrupted digital brain. The game goes as far as letting you just hang out with Reagan, now reduced to a sort of sun downing Max Headroom, as he proselytizes complete bullshit. A lot of the most absurd dialogue they give the Reagan A.I are actually just quotes from his presidency. I thought the bit where he talked about how America has too many trees and should cut them down for that reason alone was a joke, but - nope! That was a real thing, said here in the context of a literal nuclear winter. And it's all so thoroughly cinematic, even in spite of the fact that it's a game that (riddled with bugs as it is) feels duct-taped together. Conversations with some major characters will force the camera into a first person perspective for dramatic effect - the animation in these sequences is expressive, and they play with the otherwise staid conversational format in some surprising and meta ways. The incredible soundtrack, filled with folk ballads and other bits of audial Americana was collated by Quentin Tarentino's music supervisor, which is an amazing choice. You can feel the same golden bargain bin grime here as you can in Django Unchained or Jackie Brown (seriously, it rocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi2TLXt3ulc). Wasteland 3 can feel sophomoric, but it also doesn't have the same compunctions to actually say something about America as other milquetoast pieces of big budget video game satire (hello, Cyberpunk 2077). It's one of the defining texts of 2020 for me; an ugly portrait of an ugly place during a year where American exceptionalism was a bigger punchline than ever.
The concept at the heart of Umurangi Generation is that there will one day be a 'final' generation, one last set of people before the world ends; sometimes it feels like we can see it from here. The game isn't explicit about its plot or the characters within it, but the *feel* of spaces disintegrating as the 9-to-5s continue - of solidarity amongst the wreckage - saturates every moment. As Umurangi Generation progresses, spaces shift from sunset cityscapes to urban decay, and then to warzones and wastelands. The most memorable moments are always the ones inbetween the destructive setpieces, where people recover, eat, socialize, open up shop and hope for a better day than yesterday. It's also a game about photography, although it's probably evident by my failing to mention anything about it in the above paragraphs that I'm too shit at photography to appreciate it. I'll say it now: Umurangi Generation is a really, really good photography game. Like Sludge Life, you spend most of your time navigating a breathing 3D still life. These spaces are optimized to ensure even the clumsiest photographer (re: me) will close out the game with some incredible shots. It's a beautiful game that way.
Paradise Killer possesses the most paradoxical collection of descriptors of maybe any video game: it is the flashiest game of all time, an examplar of the open world format, an 'adult' murder mystery which trusts the intelligence of its audience, simultaneously traditional (a zillion collectibles! powerups! fast travel!) and non-traditional (the collectibles are basically all two-to-four sentence found poems! the powerups are footbaths that enable you to air-dash! the fast travel is a friend of yours and it goes away if you convict her of a crime!), and *the most* vaporwave thing I've seen in, like, three years. It is a wild, wild game, and I fucking love it, so much.
I've always been put off by visual novels - the lack of interactivity mixed with the fussiness of visual novel animations, text speed management and, frankly, just the act of having to read a book on a laptop has always put me off. Wide Ocean Big Jacket is the platonic ideal of the visual novel. Dialogue is delivered via white text against a black screen and the speaking character's portrait, but all of the actions that take place between dialogue occur in an explorable (but heavily gated) 3D space. The playable sections are used to establish story beats, tone and energy that dialogue alone cannot. These sequences also give the player some room to alter the pace of a story at will. Structurally it's *perfect*. There are certain stories I think would greatly benefit from light gameplay elements and bespoke 3D art, and while there are plenty of games that exist roughly in the same genre, Wide Ocean Big Jacket is easily one of the most elegant. Of course, Wide Ocean Big Jacket only works as well as it does because the writing's there. The story follows Mord, a precocious pre-teen, her indoor-kid boyfriend Ben, her aunt Cloanne and her uncle Brad as they go camping together for the first time. All four of them, aware of it or not, are in a transitional period of their lives. Listing plot points in Wide Ocean Big Jacket would reveal that basically nothing happens in this game, but the moment in time it captures is warm and nostalgic. It's a formative trip in the way that a fond memory can become a fulcrum point for a later decision or inform a personality, the kind of trip you often find yourself thinking about but never knowing exactly why. Wide Ocean Big Jacket is smart, funny and lovable. Will definitely be on the lookout for more of this studio's games in the future.
In Sludge Life, you and everyone you know is stuck in a rotten mud bucket of a town filled to the brim with waste. There's no wealth, no good work, no good homes, no stability. So what does everyone do instead? They go on strike and hang the fuck out. Everybody's smoking cigs, tripping on mushrooms, talking shit on customers, drinking, protesting, tagging buildings - the world is miserable, but the people in it are vibrant. You play as Ghost, a street artist looking to become a legend. You do so by scaling buildings, tagging everything, and stealing cool shit from people. You'll make friends, enemies, frenemies, and (if you're as clumsy as I am) will rack up quite a bit of medical debt along the way. Sludge Life is a still life painting with an electric, acid-washed Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic. Exploring Sludge Life's mucky mini-city is addicting because the spaces themselves are so fun and fucked up - tagging everything is just an excuse to get you from one absurd character to another. The writing is stellar, too. I'm a big fan of similarly minded indies like Night in the Woods and Donut County, but they admittedly have a certain indie-film flavor. Sludge Life, by contrast, is all teeth. It refuses to allow the internal logic of its world to nail down any new ideas it has, which makes the entire game feel like this grab bag of hilarious ideas. I love it. There's an apartment building in particular which is such a stupid, amazing space to explore. One of the apartments hides a man in a straightjacket and a Hannibal Lector face mask who turns out to be your biggest fan. There's an ENORMOUS baby on the 3rd floor. There's an office workspace full of people with Pidgeon heads and human bodies typing with their beaks instead of their hands. It rocks. Sludge Life is a surreal yet incredibly effective portrait of what 2020 felt like. Living in America with no hope to escape...yeah! That pretty much felt like being made immobile in a bunch of sludge while some rich guy with an escape plan killed us all.
Brazenly surreal in its imagery and boldly unflinching in its depiction of an abusive sexual relationship, Milky Way Prince would be elevated above most video games released in 2020 even if it weren't as iconoclastic as it is, partially due to the fact that it's one of the only games to come out this year that is a complete and coherent statement. Please don't interpret me as burying this game under faint praise. Milky Way Prince is a moving if uncomfortable journey into and out of a relationship in which one man nearly drowns under the cataclysm of another man's psyche. In terms of structure, this is a brilliantly designed narrative game. At Milky Way Prince's onset, you're a hopeful, if awkward young dude hoping for a rom-com moment while puttering around your apartment, until you get the meet-cute moment you've been looking for. Things inevitably begin to spin our of control as you abusive partner unloads years of unpacked aggression onto you. The interstitial sequences back at your apartment away from your partner become shorter, terser, greyer. The distance between player and protagonist in these moments is extremely cool, because you have enough space to objectively identify the abuser's chaotic behavior without ever losing sight of why the player character might feel drawn to stay in the first place. Abuse is a tough subject, which means its a subject video games only touch with the broadest of lenses. Milky Way Prince not only dives headfirst into its difficult premise, but it invents its own surreal and utterly unique visual language with which to depict that love and suffering. Its intense subject matter sometimes proves too difficult for the visual language of the game to paint an emotional landscape over, and I sometimes felt a disconnect during certain sequences which are used repeatedly to escalate the narrative above the personal and into the metaphorical cosmic. At the end of the day, Milky Way Prince is so bold and vulnerable and alive that it doesn't much matter.
Spiritfarer is a game about processing a life so that death has meaning. It's 11 beautiful character studies wrapped in a management sim/2D platformer package. It's one of the most gorgeously animated games I've ever played. The demands of the management sim don't always match the joyous, redemptive, bitter-sweet energy of the story, but it's worth powering through regardless just to get to see it all. What I like about Spiritfarer best is that even though it looks like the best Saturday morning cartoon never made, it dives into the best and the worst of life in such an honest, human way. Every passenger you ferry into the afterlife has unique experiences they want to have for the first and/or very last time before they pass on, and all of their stories hit home. You get to know and care about everyone long before they leave you for the last time; when they do leave, it's always a gut punch.
As a fan of THPS since the very first title, this Vicarious Visions remake is the best case scenario for the series. It's not just that it nails the feel and exactly replicates the level designs of the originals - it supplements them with these terrific new aesthetic changes that make 20 year-old stages feel brand new. It all just works. And - hey! That's something a little different you can say about the THPS series for a, uh...decade or so! I have some hang-ups with the structure of the single player - specifically, supplanting the full level objectives list with stat points pickups on repeat playthroughs reduces the game to busywork - but the game feel and feature list are fantastic. I've always been more a THPS 3 and 4 guy than a THPS 1 + 2 guy, so the thought of potential future remakes in this style is incredibly exciting. If they were able to gussy up the most generic of THPS 1 stages (re: "Mall," "Downtown") and make them feel fresh, I can't imagine what they'd do with the more absurd stuff from later titles. Unlike Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD Remake, Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, Tony Hawk's Project 8 and every other half-busted attempt to kickstart the THPS series back into the public consciousness, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 is a great foundation for the series to build on.
Act V and The Death of the Hired Man Each episode of Kentucky Route Zero is an affecting abstraction of contemporary America. It is a game urgently concerned with American delusion, the reduction of the common man to a number, and the uprooting of empathy. It depicts how we bring ourselves to wake up each morning to be punished for scraps - with no end in sight - only to do it all again the next day. Acts I through IV are an odyssey through American wreckage, barren landscapes where life once thrived now reduced to ashes and half-remembered stories. Act V is a ray of sunlight illuminating the wreckage. It is a poignant button on the end of the defining video game document of the 2010s. Unlike some other episodes, Act V is not a game in which you get to direct characters through decisions but a game in which you decide what meaning the decisions you've already made will have. We know where we are and we know how we got here. So what's next? Do we start again? Do we try something new? What did the sacrifices along the way ultimately mean? If this was the worst case scenario, then what does the best case scenario look like? Act V was just moments ahead of its time, that way - Kentucky Route Zero is a summation of our lives, shredded by debt as they are, and a brief, surreal history of how we got here. The system is, and always was, faulty. Act V asks us: what happens when it finally breaks? This year, it kinda broke. The answer remains ambiguous.
POTTERGAME (https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/11931) Kate B's Glorious Trainwrecks title, POTTERGAME, is an incredible piece of satirical and analytical creative writing. It's a fake Harry Potter movie tie-in, featuring stolen assets from past PS2 (?) Potter titles, but the world is jagged and senseless. Collectibles are scattered everywhere, Daniel Radcliffe's enormous digital head observes students, god-like, from a hidden backroom, and quidditch players fly T-posed through hovering Superman 64 rings. It isn't just that the game is intentionally jank - most of the concepts in POTTERGAME are broken versions of lazy, time consuming game design tropes or takedowns of Harry Potter fiction and its fandom; Dumbledore unceremoniously drops hundreds of every-flavor beans throughout the castle and demands you collect them. Ron spouts the phrase 'bloody hell' like a Pokemon. Every major objective in the game is some flavor of collect-athon. POTTERGAME also transplants J. K. Rowling's absurd and often hateful Twitter presence into the most innocuous mass media export of her work. You'll find a trans student outside of the library's restrooms criticizing the terfs that run the school. Multiple characters insist on re-iterating that wizards used to shit their pants and magic away the evidence. There is an ickabog boss fight. A character forcibly indoctrinated with British nationalism implies that the Monty Python series' non-pc outlook was an important ingredient to its humor; truthfully, is there a well of humor more thoroughly dried up than the Monty Python films? Have you ever heard anyone bring up the knights who say ni and genuinely felt any joy whatsoever in your heart? Something as chaotic and fresh as POTTERGAME is better by a mile. POTTERGAME contorts the image of the Harry Potter franchise and in doing so reveals more about the lasting impact of Rowling's work and regressive perspective than the games it mocks ever did.